Epic Games taps AWS Local Zones for Fortnite’s NA-Central servers

Starting today, Epic Games will be using AWS Local Zones to support its new NA-Central server region in Fortnite. This new Fortnite server region will bring low latency gameplay to more players in the central United States and Mexico.

The NA-Central server region will join the two other AWS-powered Fortnite server regions in North America, NA-East and NA-West. Players in North America are assigned to whichever Fortnite server region will provide the best game experience. For more information on how players will benefit from the new Fortnite server region, please refer to the Fortnite blog.

“Epic Games and AWS have worked together for over 10 years and continue to find new ways to leverage the full potential of the cloud,” said Dan Carpenter, Director of the North American Games Segment at AWS. “With the new NA-Central server region, powered by the AWS Local Zones in Dallas, Fortnite players in the central United States and Mexico can experience the best player experience through low latency gameplay.”

AWS Local Zones are a type of infrastructure deployment that places compute, storage, database, and other select AWS services close to large population and industry centers. This enables customers to run applications that require low latency for use cases such as online gaming, media and entertainment content creation, live video streaming, engineering simulations, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), machine learning inference at the edge, and hybrid cloud migrations. AWS Local Zones can also help customers meet data residency requirements in regulated industries such as healthcare, financial services, regulated gaming and the public sector. Customers can enable AWS Local Zones from the Zones tab in Settings of the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) console or the ModifyAvailabilityZoneGroup API. To learn more, see AWS Local Zones and read our guide on the Getting Started Resource Center.

Epic Games began developing its services on AWS in 2012 and went all in on AWS in 2018 to deliver the storage, analytics, and scaling capabilities critical to its business. Today, Fortnite runs almost entirely on AWS, including its worldwide game-server fleet, backend services, and websites. Using tens of thousands of Amazon EC2 instances powered by AWS Graviton processors, Epic scales compute capacity at optimal price performance to support millions of players globally every day, accelerate rendering workloads, and provide remote build pipelines for both its own and licensee Unreal Engine creators.